I don’t have a favorite system font, am I meant to? I did try to play with fonts at one point but the process of finding fonts and then figuring out how to install them was a bit much.

Ubuntu

I’ve been using Fantasque sans mono for a bunch of years now.

Fira Sans / FiraGO by Mozilla, and the new SUSE font by SUSE.

Fira Code and Caskaydia Cove Nerd Font for monospace. For other uses, I’m usually good with whatever the system ships with.

For desktop, I’ve liked Lato, Source Sans Pro, and Inter to name three.

For terminal, I used Iosevka’s customizer to create a gorgeous Fira Mono-like variant that I call Iosevka Firesque:

[buildPlans.IosevkaFiresque]
family = "Iosevka Firesque"
spacing = "term"
serifs = "sans"
noCvSs = true
exportGlyphNames = false

  [buildPlans.IosevkaFiresque.variants]
  inherits = "ss05"

    [buildPlans.IosevkaFiresque.variants.design]
    capital-g = "toothless-corner-serifless-hooked"
    capital-q = "crossing-baseline"
    g = "single-storey-serifed"
    long-s = "bent-hook-tailed"
    cyrl-a = "single-storey-earless-corner-serifed"
    cyrl-ve = "standard-interrupted-serifless"
    cyrl-capital-ze = "unilateral-serifed"
    cyrl-ze = "unilateral-serifed"
    cyrl-capital-en = "top-left-bottom-right-serifed"
    cyrl-en = "top-left-bottom-right-serifed"
    cyrl-capital-er = "open-serifless"
    cyrl-er = "earless-corner-serifless"
    cyrl-capital-u = "cursive-flat-hook-serifless"
    cyrl-u = "curly-motion-serifed"
    cyrl-capital-e = "unilateral-bottom-serifed"
    cyrl-e = "unilateral-bottom-serifed"
    brace = "straight"
    ampersand = "upper-open"
    at = "threefold"
    cent = "open"

I find comic sans mono actually looks surprisingly nice for coding and terminal.

Lato, League Spartan, League Gothic are my three most used fonts by a wide margin. Lato and its variety of weights for most things, League when I am doing design work and need a cleaner title or header.

Lately ive been weirdly taken with TT2020 Style G, which is an odd name for a no-name font that replicates an old imperfect typewriter. For whatever reason, switching my writing software to that (Manuscript) suddenly fired up my writing flow.

Iosevka

Fantasque

Hack nerd font is my go to for terminal use.

I use M+ Fonts for most of my stuff.

I know that this will anger some people, but I just use the defaults and I don’t get why there are so many fonts, since they don’t seem that much different to me.

For sans-serif, I use Mona Sans. For monospace, I use Monaspace. I think it’s a good-looking combination.

It’s actually preinstalled in a lot of systems. You can check via
gnome-font-viewer or find /usr/share/fonts -name "*Nimbus*"